Aziz Ansari Wants to Help Men Date Better

And apparently they really need it

After turning thirty and watching friends get married and have kids, Aziz Ansari became nearly obsessed with relationships and love. In his Netflix standup special Buried Alive, released last month, he opens up about his fears of commitment and just how ridiculous it is that people want to commit to someone else until they get sick of each other or die. Now Ansari is developing a new hour of comedy and working on a book on the topic, holding focus groups and "Work in Progress" talks with academics like NYU sociology professor Eric Klineberg in which they divide the audience by gender and quiz them on their dating habits. We recently spoke with the Parks and Recreation actor about his holiday plans, the book, his upcoming standup act, and just why young men are so dumb when it comes to women.

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ESQUIRE.COM: You're spending Christmas with your family. Do they bother you about settling down and having kids?

AZIZ ANSARI: No, they don't pressure me on that stuff. There's probably a part of them that would rather I be married, on my way to having kids, so they can have grandkids or whatever, but if you watch that special, you know what's in my head.

ESQ: With New Year's, have you ever been in that singles' situation where you spend the night trying to find a woman to kiss when the clock strikes 12?

AA: That's definitely a dicey situation because you gotta find someone, right? I usually have been able to make do. I try to have a date or something so I'm not prowling around at 11:45.

ESQ: Now that you've been doing these Work in Progress talks, what are some of the more surprising things you've learned from the audience?

AA: Well, it's really interesting hearing how dumb some dudes are. [Laughs] They don't think about what they're saying. At all. The whole landscape has changed. Whenever you talk to younger people and bring up a phone call, people are terrified, like, "Oh my God, no! Not a phone call!" I've never done online dating. We started doing focus groups on online dating and this dude came up and went on his OkCupid profile. He was not like a stud or anything, and he opened up his profile and there were like 30 women who were all fairly attractive. He clicks on this one woman who's very attractive, looks at all her photos, and goes, "Eh, no." I'm like, "What?! What are you doing?! You from 30 years ago would be shitting yourself if you saw that woman. That's your thought process?!" He's like, "Nah, there might be someone I like a little bit more later on." It's just like, "Wow!" That's a new kind of mentality.

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ESQ: The phone thing is bizarre. Outside of my wife and my parents, I rarely call anyone. Is that the same for you?

AA: Yeah! I used to call friends from back home in South Carolina, or when I was in L.A. I'd call friends in New York every week or so, just to check in and talk for 30, 40 minutes. Now, I never do that. I'll talk to someone for five minutes but a 30-, 40-minute phone call? Your friend would be like, "What are you doing, man? I got shit to do! How long are we talking for?" [Laughs]

ESQ: Have you been getting asked for more advice about dating now that you've been studying it so much?

AA: No, I've always tried to maintain that I don't have any advice to give. I'm a curious observer. But I've gotta say, the work we've been doing has been intense. We've been doing focus groups, talking to men and women for hours, and at this point I definitely have some insights I didn't have before. When you reveal them to large groups of dudes, they're blown away. They seem like fairly obvious things, but it's interesting how there's so much of a disconnect between what a lot of women want and what guys think they're supposed to do.

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ESQ: Like what?

AA: There's a thing I'll do in my show where I ask if anyone has asked someone out recently, and someone will raise their hand. I'll look at their text messages and you can totally see what's going on through someone's head. When you read it back to someone the way I do onstage, it's very obvious that it's dumb. Even the simple things — younger dudes especially, they'll keep texting back and forth without actually asking the girl to do anything. One show, this guy was like, "Yeah, that girl didn't really like me anymore." The last message was, "Good seeing you at the party, take care," and he's like, "She didn't write me back." I'm like, "You didn't ask her to do anything! Why don't you ask her right now? Name a place! Invite her to something!" So he did and by the end of the show, she wrote back and said she'd go out with him. It's so crazy. He was ready to give up without ever really asking this person to do anything.

ESQ: Have you found it any harder to be in a relationship as you've gotten more famous?

AA: Everyone's first thought is "These women are going to take advantage of you" or "Someone's only going to date you because you're famous." That stuff's not really an issue because that's super-easy to see through. Nobody's ever gone out with me and was like, "Oh, uh, are you going to buy me a car?" The reason it's difficult is you don't live in one place. I live in L.A., I go on tour all the time, I'm in New York half the year — it's very hard to be in a relationship.

ESQ: You've said you want to move your comedy away from telling stories about messing with your younger cousins Harris and Darwish, but now that they're older, are they asking you about girls?

ESQ: In Buried Alive, there's that great moment where a guy in the audience says he proposed to his girlfriend at a high-end restaurant, during lunch. What other funny proposal stories have you heard?

AA: A guy said he had a bunch of puppies wearing t-shirts that spelled out, "Will you marry me, Jenny?" I was like, "Man, how did you get the dogs to line up?" and he's like, "I couldn't. It went horribly." That's a very foreseeable problem.

ESQ: In terms of the book, are you trying to make it more humorous or serious?

AA: Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. The goal would be both. With Buried Alive, even friends of mine have told me that the special comes up when they're talking about marriage and children in their own relationships. It's started this discussion about those issues and our generation's fears about that stuff. The new [standup] hour that I'll be touring, that's pretty much what the book is about.

ESQ: What's the new hour like compared to Buried Alive?

AA:Buried Alive is about the fear of settling down and babies and marriage and all these issues couples have. The new hour is about how the whole process of finding that person to settle down with has totally changed in the last 30 years.

ESQ: Has doing all this changed your personal views on relationships?

AA: Not really. It's more like, "I'm not the only one who feels this way."

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